


matryoshka

by thehandsingsweapon



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Magic, Alternate Universe - Modern with Magic, Fae & Fairies, Werewolves, Witches, magical mystery hour
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-11-02
Updated: 2018-02-05
Packaged: 2019-01-28 09:50:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 13,102
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12603908
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thehandsingsweapon/pseuds/thehandsingsweapon
Summary: Yuuri Katsuki, pianist and modern-day-witch, meets Victor Nikiforov, theater major with-a-secret, at a carnival masquerade. It's nice, he thinks, to be wanted by someone so beautiful. Like a fairytale. And just like a fairytale, once the spell of the evening is over, he can go back to being mundane and unremarkable, but at least he'll still have the memory of Victor's kiss, proof that for a moment he got to touch something exquisite.Just one night, Victor thinks, coming to terms with the way it's possible to have everything anyone could want and nothing anyone would desire at precisely the same time. To expect more is impossible, but Yuuri is a pebble thrown into a pond; real love has a way of waking sleeping things, of shattering deceptions. It all goes back to the one question Victor thinks will be his undoing:“Who cursed you?”“Me, darling? ... You must be mistaken.”Yuuri's the first person he can't convince. It's the first lie Victor can't sell.





	1. february | mila

**Author's Note:**

> trying some new things out with my writing style via this fic, so it'll take longer to update (aiming for once a month) while i work through that. and in general this is kind of an intricate story, so there are ... tricksy things ahead! tone-wise it's going to be pretty different from the other stuff i've published so far. 
> 
> if you leave parts of it feeling like you're not entirely sure what's going on, i did my job right, but you can always hit me up in comments or on tumblr with theories ;D

**February 2017, Carnival**

 

It begins like this:

The words _hello beautiful_ are expertly drizzled over the shell of Yuuri Katsuki’s ear.

They’re perfectly placed, like a dart, and if they’re dangerous to him, Cupid’s poison is so, so sweet. Isn’t that the way of it, though? The god of love rarely misses, and after all, there’s a reason why even Shakespeare couldn’t resist the joke: _I will live in thy heart, die in thy lap, and be buried in thy eyes._

La petite mort. Just a little death.

 

 

 * * * 

 

 

**February 2017, The Day After**

 

Yuuri wakes in a bed that isn’t his in a place humming with an underlying, inexplicable white noise that he can’t quite place. It feels like a forgotten memory, the sort of thing he’d get right if he could just put his finger on it. The King-sized bed is a little too firm, nothing like the nest he’s made of his own space at home, and there’s a pervasive, almost electric charge in the air, curiously inorganic. It reminds him a little bit of illusion magic, except as far as he can tell there’s none of that to be found, no auras for his own powers to catch on and twine around.

Whatever it is has a way of nullifying other scents, like a fading floral cologne, like sweat, like skin. These are organic smells and they ought to comfort him, but they’re weak, and their details get lost in this place where the luxe sheets are crisp and too-white, and where even the sunlight coming in through a bay window feels hostile instead of soft. There’s no dust to trickle through the beams, no glowing miracle of morning. This place doesn’t feel lived-in, and because it doesn’t feel lived-in, everything about it seems to whisper _you shouldn’t be here._

His clothes are on the floor. It’s smooth, original hardwood; mahogany. Yuuri’s dreamed of living in a place like this, someplace old where he might expose the original character and depth of a building, bring it back to life somehow.

The reality is a little different, perhaps precisely because it doesn’t feel real yet. The world tilts while he looks at the floor, and the words _blood red_ come to mind. Jarring. Like being in a dream, except he’s absolutely certain he’s awake. The pounding headache and the cotton-dry tang of his mouth have more to say about this landscape than anything he sees.

He’s used to his mind playing tricks on him. Other people get neurochemistry they can trust. Yuuri’s got a gremlin in his brain, a little creature of panic who tends to wreak havoc the moment he takes his eyes off of it. He tells himself this is going to be one of those days, and he readies himself to cope.

Yuuri only half-expects there to be another body in bed next to him, something to keep dear and close, yet he’s equally unsurprised by its absence. He’s alone here, too hungover to puzzle out the contradictions: for instance, his head aches and his magic tingles, but his body feels well-used, and lived in.

That’s ridiculous. There’s no making a home out of his arms.

Everyone has a place.

Just not inside someone else.

He’s not going to stay to find out why these things are the case.

Going home with a stranger after a masquerade at Carnival is mistake enough. Yuuri can fight his own demons, or he can deal with other humans, but he already knows to try and do both at once this morning is a losing proposition. The only thing he passes on his way to the hallway as he dresses is an ornate, antique mirror tilted long and lean against the far wall, and only out of morbid curiosity does Yuuri spare himself a glance. He expects to calculate the damage. He knows how hungover he is, can imagine how this all started, sloppy and messy and a little out of _control_.

Control. A word Yuuri Katsuki has a love-hate relationship with. His life is easier when things come in neat boxes, _no surprises please,_ orderly and dull and predictable. And yet:

_That’s not how life is meant to be._

With the exception of one subtle red mark, a kiss placed too long and too hard over the nest of his beating heart, he’s unmarked and unbruised. _Victor,_ he thinks, and he wipes his glasses down, and then tries and fails not to linger on the new memories that are associated with this word.

Victor had at first kissed hard, like a conqueror, and then his lips became whisper-soft instead. He’d twined fast, careless fingers into Yuuri’s belt, and he’d climbed over Yuuri’s body like a creeping shadow, and then Yuuri had said or done something, he can’t quite recall, and it had stilled Victor’s fingers and made the seas shift in his eyes.

Between them is something that plants flowers into granite and makes them bloom. Yuuri had been selfish: to be wanted for even a moment by someone so beautiful, well, that was …

_(“Are you pretending?”_

_“No,” said Victor, but even he sounded surprised to hear it.)_

Extraordinary.

His body says _stay._ His mind howls _leave._ His heart hums _not yet._

His magic, the living wild thing that thrives just under Yuuri’s skin, whispers adoration and warning in equal measure, and that’s the voice Yuuri knows to listen to the most. He dresses, and he goes. There are thirteen unanswered messages on his phone from Phichit, but he has a morning to navigate, even as the ship of his being is tossed and turned by the after-effects of Hurricane Champagne.

It’s going to be a very long day.

He remembers Victor’s eyes the best. They made the word for Yuuri’s favorite color woefully incomplete.

Victor. _Who are you?_

_I’m Victor._

 

 

 * * * 

 

 

**February 2017, Carnival**

 

“Hello, beautiful.” Victor knows the game and how to play it. All the world’s a stage, and he’s got one of _those_ voices, the kind that pitches from saint to sinner. He understands how to use it, how to command a reaction, and _oh,_ how he’s angling for one here, letting the punctuation on the compliment be the soft exhale of his breath over the ridge of a stranger’s ear.

He’s been watching a metamorphosis over the course of four glasses of champagne. There’s the real world and then there’s the _realer_ world, places Victor Nikiforov sees at once, and if at the start of the evening he notices the way white magic clings to an unassuming young man in plain, dress blacks and a simple gladiator’s mask, he doesn’t let it register.

Victor is well acquainted with the dangers of pretty things. In a way, he is just such a creature, himself.

Over the course of the evening, this young man becomes inevitable, a black butterfly hovering on the corners of Victor’s field of vision every time he looks around. _Is it because he keeps standing where you’re going to look, or because you keep looking where he’s standing,_ someone more astute might want to know. Victor’s plenty astute. Astute enough to know that his entire life is constructed of a spider’s web of self-deceptions, and that they’re best left unexamined. Gladiator Mask talks to a small cluster of people Victor recognizes from the music department, and he takes a turn on the piano on stage while Victor pretends not to be watching those elegant, spellbinding fingers do their work. He has to remind himself that the music is manufactured by the piano twice. Blinks and looks for some kind of spell. _Not the trusting type, are we?_

Victor wants those hands, wants to nip fingertips, wants palms on his back and fisted knots in his hair. Admitting this much is easy. Necessary, even. After all, the important thing about being a liar is always to hold onto just a little bit of the truth.

The pianist is well-received for his impromptu turn on the stage, and he flushes under the applause, a beautiful sweep of crimson visible even under the gold edge of his mask. It creeps all the way to the tips of his ears. Victor admits to himself that he’s charmed, enchanted even. _Little c, little e._ The musician rushes to the champagne bar, where Victor watches him drink. He has a startlingly clear vision of pressing his mouth to the bob of the pianist’s adam’s apple as he swallows, tells himself he could live with that much.

After the third glass, the pianist dances, and Victor catches himself wearing a grin that Christophe Giacometti can’t see underneath the full-faced tragedian’s mask he’s wearing: half smile, half sorrow. The mask, at least. The smile beneath is a wolf’s grin: crooked and playboy predatory, a role he plays often because his dalliances are all, by necessity, brief.

_He deserves better._

Victor knows this, but Victor is also selfish, and among the dozen new wants he’s currently evaluating is the one real danger: that if he can just have this, it will be enough to withstand his endless number of nights.

“I ne’er saw true beauty ‘till this night,” Victor quips, disguising the truth in flippancy.

He tells himself it’s safer.

“You hate that play,” Chris reminds him, to which Victor can only make tut-tut noises as he makes his way into the dance floor, moves through it like they’ve already blocked the scene. _I’m an actor, not a person._

Line. Line. Line. He pretends to be joking and everyone will buy it, hook, line, and sinker, because sometimes he’s so great an actor that he even fools himself. _Hello, beautiful,_ he hums. He drizzles it like honey. He spins webs of silk.

He needs a different metaphor; something that ends in actually letting this beautiful thing go. _Improvise._

“Will you dance with me?”

They’re perfect together. By the second dance he’s considering how he’d have to tilt his head down for a kiss, or perhaps the musician might stand up on his tip-toes. Victor makes a good frame for him, which is the lead’s job in a dance: he sets the direction and opens doors with his hands and his arms that this young man spins through with grace and ease. He’s meant to carve out a space on the floor, to create a spotlight; Victor does those things at the same time that he recognizes they’re not necessary. Monarchs are so-named for a reason. The real marvel is the broad smiles he keeps getting, the spellcraft of laughter and simple joy.

Victor laughs more than once in an entirely uncalculated way, and so surprises himself.

It’s the third dance when it happens, the thing that’s going to ruin him, their bodies flush: those beautiful hands have crawled up his chest, and those soft features change again: they shift like faerie lights from attraction to puzzlement; from wonder to concern.

“Who cursed you?”

“Me, darling?” Victor coos, and he curls his hand around a palm, kisses the tips of fingers. He conjures distractions; that’s all they’ve ever wanted him for. “You must be mistaken.”

The stranger is unconvinced.

Victor has never been unable to sell a lie before.

“Fine,” he says, but there’s a stubborn bend in his brow. “Have it your way.”

Later, when they’re kissing in Victor’s flat, unhurried lips and rushed, rushed hands, he’s given a name to put to all of his wanting:

_I’m Yuuri._

“Tell me your name, at least,” Yuuri says. “Who are you?”

 _At least._ Like this man who’s known him for a handful of hours already knows how much he’s obfuscating. It’s not possible, of course, but it’s strange to be so seen-through.

He hates it as much as he loves it.

“I’m Victor.”

 

 * * * 

 

 

**February 2017, The Day After**

 

 _“Wow.”_ Only Phichit Chulanont can manage to imbue the word with this much meaning and so little judgment. He whistles in a falling tri-tone, giving Yuuri what’s meant to be just a once-over precisely three times. “You know, you haven’t even been on a date since Freshman year.”

“I know.”

“And you went home with a complete stranger at the masquerade for Carnival.”

“Yeah,” says Yuuri, a little pointedly. His head still hurts, which is only the most obvious of his symptoms. His _person_ feels jumbled, like an out of tune piano, each aura slightly out of its proper orbit. “I _know_ ,” he emphasizes. “I was there.”

He remembers and yet he doesn’t resonate.

Phichit’s brows lift for a moment. “Nothing for it now,” he says, and he pushes Yuuri into the bathroom. “Get cleaned up. You promised me we’d go to swap-meet.”

“Phichit, I’m still hungover,” Yuuri grumbles as he enters into battle with their shower, which provides comfort only on a razor’s edge between burning hot and icy cold.

Today he doesn’t care which side of the coin toss he lands on.

“Aw, Yuuri.” Phichit has a way of making his voice sound sickly-sweet, and that’s always when he means to stir up the most trouble. It’s the effect of a humid breeze on a day with a sickly-green sky: the tornado’s always coming after. “You say that like you think I care.”

 

 

 * * * 

 

 

**February 2017, Elsewhere**

 

“You should be more careful,” Fury tells him with glittering green eyes and the sharpness of his mother’s smile. _“The fates have no emotion but envy.”_

Like everything else in his life, Victor is torn between two responses. _Well, you would know_ is a dangerous, knife-edged quip and it says entirely too much about his heart. Leaving enough of the witch on his skin to be read was a careless mistake.

Worse: it was a telling one.

Yuuri’s magic clings to him so beautifully. He dispels it without admitting to himself that he doesn’t want to dispel it.

_Liar. Liar. Liar._

“Yura,” he murmurs, as he rotates through another of an endless collection of masks. This one is a soft smile that crinkles the corners of his eyes, well-worn, comfortable. Victor has been told before by people who frighten even him that there’s something strangely animal about it, a kind of disarming camouflage, the sort of thing that lures prey. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

 

 

 * * * 

 

 

**February 2017, The Day After**

 

Swap-Meet is the kind of place Phichit Chulanont thrives. He drifts like a bumblebee from one stall to the next, an absolute fount of curiosity and interest. Amid dozens of tables of vendors come to sell second-hand wares, he blossoms, leaning in with eyes alight to hear the story of any particular piece which catches his fancy.

And many things do.

He will emerge from this re-charged and energized and as excited as he came in; he will have found half a dozen different trinkets to carry back home; he’s always making honey.

Yuuri can’t do it.

He gives up around the time Phichit is investigating a garden of succulent plants in the form of hanging glass ornaments. Wanders off on his own, aimless and adrift and alone.

For a brief, glorious moment at Carnival, he’d gotten to be someone else. Now he’s ordinary Yuuri Katsuki again, unassuming and innocuous, unremarkable. He lets the natural tide of the market ferry him off to less-populated, quieter aisles, hoping to be left alone.

He just doesn’t have that sort of luck.

 _Love,_ he hears someone say, the tail end of a quip he’s missed, the feather of some arrow fired in his direction. “Sorry, what?”

It’s a woman’s voice. She’s got the reddest hair Yuuri has ever seen and a broad grin to match. Twinkling eyes that promise mischief and mayhem, but not malice. “I said,” she repeats, positively chuffed, “want me to tell your fortune, love?” His would-be soothsayer sits at a single table loaded up with various kinds of incense and essential oils, shuffling a deck of tarot cards between nimble fingers, and there’s magic enough around her that he lingers and inspects.

“That’s the sort of thing my friend would be more into,” Yuuri murmurs. Phichit probably has an interesting fortune. Yuuri’s is like a weather forecast: _you felt dread yesterday, you are feeling dread today, you will feel dread tomorrow._ Except it’s not entirely true: an anomaly got planted in the ecosystem at carnival, and for a brief moment, he felt extraordinary. “Mine’s bound to be pretty uninteresting.”

Amongst everything else for sale on the table there is one of those round vintage dolls, the Russian kind, and this one even looks a little bit like her: not in the dress, of course; the fortune-teller is artist-alley chic and the doll is vintage folklore. It’s in the face of the woman painted on the outside shell: red-headed and blue-eyed, with the impression of a bright smile.

He’s not sure why he has it in his hand, but it’s earned him a bit of a sharp look while she shuffles. “That old thing’s broken,” she says. Yuuri’s already noticed: he can see the seam where the doll should come apart, but it won’t budge in his hands.

Strange. It feels _meant_ to open, and if he looks closely, he sees it, a little thread of magic bound up in the doll, whisper-weak and nearly untraceable. “I like fiddling with things,” he says.

What he means is _I like fixing things_ because at the end of the day that’s what his magic wants; buried under his skin is the impulse of a healer, a craft that always wants to restore missing pieces and make damaged things whole.

“Three cards,” she wheedles. “Three cards and I’ll let you take that for free.”

Yuuri sighs and supposes he’s got nothing better to do. Certainly nothing as exciting as a beautiful stranger with sea-blue eyes and platinum blonde hair is ever as likely to come his way again. “Isn’t it supposed to be the other way around?”

“What do you mean?”

“Me paying you.”

“Oh, honey.” She kicks out a stool and gypsy-grins when he sits. “Maybe you already are. Name’s Mila, by the way.”

“Yuuri,” he says, and in these situations it’s only his mother’s manners and the family instinct for hospitality that have him adding _it’s nice to meet you._ Trouble is, Yuuri can hardly ever tell if he means it. Mila simply grins again, bright and clever; lets him cut her deck.

 _Past, present, future,_ she tells him, making him choose three cards from the broad spread of the deck.

The nine of swords lands in his past, hostile and condemning. Yuuri knows enough to know it’s not a promising way to start a reading; the figure represented has his face buried in his hands, despairing under the influence of the nine blades hovering nearby. _Anxious sort?_ Mila wants to know. Yuuri snorts, which is confirmation enough. She tells him about the card, describes him at his worst: it’s an image ready-made for the sort of person who’s prone to creating their own nightmares, who lingers overlong in a terror their own mind constructs.

Yuuri doesn’t want to dwell on it. Nor does he feel like explaining himself at length to a stranger, no matter how prettily she smiles or how swiftly chance has identified him in her deck. “Guilty,” he says, hoping to move on.

“Curious that it’s in the past position,” Mila hums, ignoring him. Yuuri doesn’t blame her. It’s easily done. _Unremarkable,_ he thinks, while his magic sings _liar._ “Perhaps a habit best put behind you.”

Then she flips over the card for the present. _The Hanged Man._

_(“Who cursed you?”_

_“Me, darling? … You must be mistaken.”)_

He half-listens while Mila tells him what a card in this position means. _It’s rather dark, you know. Best to inspect yourself clearly to make sure this isn’t you. It could mean someone else —_

“It is someone else.” He looks at the figure. It stares back. _Victor._

“They’d have to be pretty important to have such a position of prominence,” she cautions him.

Victor isn’t supposed to be important. Their collision is the kind of thing Yuuri expects to be able to wash off. He, himself, is watercolor.

Nevertheless. Here they are, each at their worst: Yuuri in the past and Victor in the present and the future still face down on the table. “… Well, if you’re sure,” Mila murmurs. “It’s worth being a little cautious: the ease with which someone rests like this tends to suggest they’re a little too comfortable with their bindings, and the hidden hands behind the back imply deceit. Its presence following the swords card … suggests conflict. This is someone it’d be unwise to do battle with.”

 _What about battle_ ** _for_** _,_ Yuuri thinks and does not ask, because the idea of it is ridiculous. Victor strode into his life with every assurance of conquest; he’s the last person in the world who might require a champion. “Darker than I expected,” Mila murmurs, shaking her head, and he resists etching out a laugh. The cottony feel is back in his mouth; the undercurrent, the electric hum.

Mila flips the third card.

The lovers.

 

 

 * * * 

 

 

**February 2017, Elsewhere**

 

“You went _looking_ for him.”

“So?” Mila grins. It’s in her nature to instigate, to stir the pot. She’s not as fey-thing like the green-eyed menace scowling at her side, but she nearly could be. She has a healthy respect for them, traipses with care around their courts and their intrigues. It keeps things interesting, at the very least. “It was fun.”

“Fun,” he echoes, deeply disapproving. Yuri doesn’t need to speak for Mila to read the warning in his grimace. “You’re always getting into trouble, Baba. Someday it’s going to come back to bite you.”

“Psh.” She’s unconcerned. At the end of the day, all she does is leave little threads. It’s not Mila’s fault when other people pull. She won’t take the blame for the human spirit, and the way it _wants_ things to unravel.

So what if she’s a little impish sometimes. _Technically_ it’s not even her fault; she’s got a Grandmother who walked a little _too_ far on the wild-side to blame for these little devilish streaks.

He grumbles. It’s on-brand. She lets him. “So what happens now?”

“I’d say that’s all up to him.”

 

 

 * * * 

 

 

**February 2017, Two Days After**

 

Sitting on Yuuri Katsuki’s nightstand is a matryoshka doll with a bright smile and red, red hair.

He wakes up this morning like any other, reaches for it, intuitively twists. _Broken,_ Mila had told him, _it’s permanently stuck._ It’s Sunday; without any classes to attend, he’s got nothing better to do than puzzle over it. Yuuri migrates to the corner where he’s crammed papasan chair and a bookshelf full of spell supplies, settles in by setting chamomile into his diffuser and lighting three different white candles. Various bottles, stones, and herbs line the top shelf; after a moment he chooses rose oil, and smears a drop onto his forefinger before tracing it over the doll’s spell-locked seam.

By instinct more than anything else, he blows carefully over the streak of oil on the seam, offering a little bit of breath, a little bit of whatever useless essence constitutes himself.

_Pop._

It opens.

Standing in line for her morning coffee, Mila Babicheva smirks.

On stage already for a weekend rehearsal, Victor Nikiforov thinks he smells roses and then promptly forgets himself. The memory of Yuuri Katsuki’s softest kiss commits daylight robbery, assaults him out of nowhere. It’s the gentlest thief, but it also leaves him naked and hungry on the side of the road someplace, _exposed_. He’s been blown over by just the memory of a breath, taken apart by a feather. _Monarch wings tremble and the whole world changes._ Victor doesn’t even like math, even if he likes to think he can navigate chaos.

“Victor?”

“Sorry.” He smiles. He pretends. He offers no explanation. “Coffee hasn’t kicked in.” _It’s too early._ Two lies. He never really sleeps and he doesn’t drink coffee. He likes to pretend. It’s easier. “Take it again, from the top?”

“Sure.”

 

 

 

 


	2. march | seung-gil

**February 2017**

 

Yuuri looks at the matryoshka doll cradled in his lap, and gently pulls it apart at the seams. In his hands, a tiny auburn-haired girl in folk dress splits into two and comes apart, and Yuuri has his ownneurochemistry to blame for thinking that he sympathizes, that he understands what it is to break open along all of his fissures.

Maybe it’s the magic in him that does this: reaches and yearns. All Yuuri knows is he feels the most like a failure whenever he tries to explain himself: like the first time he sat in a counselor’s office after his first real panic attack, for instance. He understands the signals of his own anxiety now, knows that after lightning he needs to count for thunder. On every horizon of his being there are thunderstorms; Yuuri watches himself and waits for the tornados, rebuilds the wreckage that he strews about his own being, reassembles the pieces that look like his life.

Among the odds and ends on the bookshelf is a calligraphy set his mother got him once, years ago, and a small stack of origami paper in all kinds of colors, things he only uses to write when something feels important. He does it now. _Mila,_ Yuuri writes, and he turns the paper overin his hands while he waits for the ink to dry.

He tries to think without actually thinking.

The folding is yet another nervous tic. Sometimes it feels like everything he does is, like Yuuri himself is a paper house, composed entirely of tells. When he looks down again, he’s folded the page into the shape of a small horse. Absently, Yuuri puts the papercraft into the matryoshka doll’s round base. Then he gets on with it: he carefully presses the girl’s two halves back together, and sets her carefully on the bookshelf, right next to a place where he’s pinned up a carnelian pendant that he never wears. It’s a well-intended gift from Phichit, this, but it is not in Yuuri’s nature to dress himself up in the things he is not. Carnelian is a stone of confidence and vitality, of sexuality, even, and Yuuri can’t say why he sets the doll there except that there’s room and it feels like the place: red hair, red rock.

Intuition is always simple until it isn’t.

He usually tries not to look at these little gossamer threads of instincts too directly. Like the rising dawn, part of the magic of insight is in its transience: in that one moment where everything is golden and clear. Thinking about the moment itself is the best way to ensure that it loses everything numinous about it right before it passes, lost forever.

In his hands, the next doll in the series isn’t a red-headed girl in folk attire at all. It’s an unsmiling, serious looking man with dark eyes.

Curious.

Yuuri twists, and the doll does not open.

He’s about to reach for the rose oil again when his phone rings, and shatters the daze he’s been in. It’s as good a reminder as any that he occupies reality, not the space of the fairy tales he read as a child, and in reality toy dolls don’t matter all that much. Neither, for that matter, do card games. _This is silly,_ Yuuri thinks, and he sets the serious-looking doll on the shelf and puts the incense out, leaves the safe haven of this cozy little corner to pick up the phone.

At the end of the day, what does any of it matter, the dolls, the cards? Besides, the more he thinks about it, the more the reading rings false to him: Victor is a place he went once and only once; more importantly, surely he is a place someone like Victor will never want to visit again.

 

 

 

* * * 

 

 

 

**March, 2017**

 

Midterms arrive. With them comes Yuuri’s mid-term juries, time he spends practicing until his wrists hurt and his professor scowls at him for making all of the wrong choices. He writes a ten page paper on Gregorian Chant; suffers through a music theory exam he almost has a meltdown in. It’s the perfect time of year for a higher-than-usual dose of anxiety, for an uptick in his own ever-present radio static. It’s not the only thing that rumbles: early-spring storms crackle overnight, bringing thunder, lightning, and sickly green clouds that block out the stars and do their best to eliminate the light of the moon.

It is the morning after one of these rains, when dew drops linger on greening grass all over campus and the air is sticky-sweet. Trees across the quad show signs of budding, prophesy life, and students who might usually take shortcuts across the grass think twice because deep, muddy tracks mark the way of those who’ve gone ahead, the ones who’ve tried and scuffed off their regrets as streaks of mud on the concrete, their lessons learned.

Spring is a season of rebirth and renewal, and these things are always messy when they’re real.

He doesn’t notice the large, shaggy dog following him across campus until well after his first class, once the one coffee Yuuri allows himself on days like these has had time to kick in. Yuuri likes dogs. They’re humanity’s better angels. He snaps his fingers, whistles, and even gets down into a squat so he’ll be on the dog’s level. Its ears flatten, and it bares white, white teeth, but it does not growl.

“Here boy,” he calls, gently. “It’s okay.”

The dog retreats into the bushes and darts off, wolf-swift, wild.

Across campus the bell-tower begins to chime the alma mater, reminding Yuuri he’s probably going to be late for his Physics of Music exam.

 

 

 

* * * 

 

 

 

“You look like shit,” Minako Okukawa tells him helpfully as he shows up for work. Yuuri teaches a couple beginner dance classes at her studio: several kid’s ballet courses and another ballroom class for adults. It’s both sanctuary and penance: the few hours of classes, he’s learned, are a good way to contribute to his share of the rent without having to rely too much on any extra money sent from home. They’re also the most reliable way of keeping off the freshman fifteen, which is in his case is less the result of beer-binges and keg-lifts, and more his bad habit of stress eating every terrible little pre-made pie sold in the student union at 3 A.M.

No good decision ever gets made at three in the morning. It's a very different kind of  _witching hour._

He’s a music major because dancing, somehow, feels too personal to share on a big stage. Amongst an orchestra, Yuuri can pour himself into what he’s doing without imagining a lone spotlight. Still, there’s something about keeping it up here which still lets Yuuri process himself. The studio offers a space where he can put himself into a fire and emerge from it refined. Minako lets him use it between classes, usually, and leans against the doorframe while he stretches. “What’s the deal with the missing student, anyway?”

“Huh?”

“Korean kid. Computer science, I think?” Minako gives him one of her all-seeing looks and Yuuri comes up short. “They’re saying he’s missed three, four days of class now. You haven’t looked into it?”

“I had midterms,” he mutters, as he moves to the bar.

Minako’s stare grows no less pointed. A small part of Yuuri resents it, would like to stay safe and small and unremarkable. The bigger part crackles under his skin and demands recognition.

She much know which side wins. “Twenty minutes,” she tells him, “I’ve got a private lesson coming in at eight.”

Yuuri promptly loses track of time.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Victor Nikiforov is seven minutes early to his private lesson. The end-of-term musical is _Chicago_ and he’s been cast in the role of Billy Flynn, which is all well-and-good except that Victor’s not especially fond of the dance sequences and he’s not all that excited about trying his hand at this much singing. It isn’t because he can’t. His command of the stage is part of the bargain he struck, and there’s little within its bounds that hasn’t been granted to him accordingly.

Rather: music is terrifyingly honest sometimes, and Billy Flynn is a clever rake, a man who makes a living bending the truth.

Perhaps it won’t even be performance, at that point. 

Anyway, it’s the dance sequence he’s here for, seeking advice off-campus where his reputation as a theater prodigy can be protected by the four walls of a small, little-known dance studio.

This was the idea, at least.

In front of him, a lithe body twists into a tour en l’air, and for the second time in as many months whatever it is that makes up the essence of what Yuuri Katsuki is assaults him with swift prejudice.

_Yuuri._

He can’t decide what it is that does the work so efficiently: the arc of Yuuri’s spine, perhaps, or the reach of those nimble fingers. All he knows is anyone who has ever peddled grace as a soft thing has been selling a half-truth. Grace is vicious.

Yuuri pirouettes, and Victor wonders how he ever convinced himself he’d be contented with just the one stolen night. Except, of course, he knows how. _We’re actors, not people._ He forces himself to remember the morning after, returning to a bedroom Yuuri already left, without so much as the courtesy of a number Victor knows he would not have let himself call.

He digs deep into the sting of that, like a splinter lodged in his thumb, worries at it until he can assemble someone actually capable of resisting the fruit of Yuuri’s mouth, the honey of his hums. “Well,” Victor whistles. What he means to say is something like _this explains everything,_ but his own traitorous heart improvises. “What an unexpected surprise.”

He _loves_ surprises.

Yuuri crashes to a stop. “V-Victor?”

Victor selects a winning smile from a thousand different variations on the same theme, and he purrs syllables. “Yuuri.”

An older woman steps into the studio, drawn by their voices. “You two know each other,” she observes idly. _Minako,_ Victor recalls. They spoke on the phone. He lets himself imagine a world where he tells her there’s been a change of plans, that he intends to plant himself into the wood and watch Yuuri continuously unfold until there’s nothing left about him to learn.

“We’ve met.” Yuuri is curt, and flushed, and Victor doesn’t think it’s all necessarily the result of exercise. “Once.”

“I didn’t know you took dance lessons, Yuuri.” He knows other, more salient facts, like the way Yuuri reacts to nibbling on his ear or the way he laces his fingers behind a lover’s neck when he doesn’t want to stop kissing. He knows the enveloping softness of Yuuri’s arms and the white promise of Yuuri’s magic; he understands that it’s been weeks and he still wishes it would linger on the static cold of his pillows. He knows Yuuri dances the way he plays the piano, that for better or worse he throws his whole self into it like a man leaping off of a ledge.

Victor knows he will either fly or fall. Perhaps he doesn’t know any other way to be except to constantly vibrate there with all the fragile brilliance of a butterfly, building a life right on the border of glory and terror.

“I’m an assistant teacher, actually.” Prickly, sometimes, too; Victor can’t help but flash a grin at the way Yuuri’s spine straightens. He likes these little flickers of fight. Pushes back to try to unfurl even more of them.

“Perhaps I should take lessons with you, then.”

Yuuri looks at him for a long moment, like Victor is a maze he is quickly learning how to navigate. This is not a good thing; Victor knows what is hidden at the center, and this is why he constantly rewrites the map of himself, why he throws away the keys.

Minako clears her throat and looks pointedly at the clock. Yuuri takes her hint like a soldier to orders: he snaps to and begins a retreat.

Victor almost survives it when he makes it to the door. “Get coffee with me after?” he asks. He usually doesn’t have to ask, but Yuuri? Yuuri makes him want to give chase.

Yuuri looks at him for what can be no more than a second, though Victor feels it stretch and snap. The fluidity of time is both an old friend and a hated enemy. “Not tonight,” he says, and before Victor can react, the door swings open and closes, leaving Victor to watch him flee across the street and out of view. He does this until he realizes that he, too, is being monitored. With a glance back towards the woman who runs the place, he simply grins again and takes a line from Billy Flynn’s book; recites it with all of Flynn’s charm and swagger. _“My client feels that it was a combination of liquor and jazz that led to the downfall,”_ he says.

Minako flashes a grin. It’s merciless. “You ever break that boy’s heart and I will help his sister hide your body.”

Victor has seen dark courts with friendlier smiles. “Do you start every lesson this way?”

“Only yours,” she says. He reads between the lines. _He’s special. He’s precious._

On that point, they agree.

Before Victor leaves, he catches a glimpse of a trophy case along the wall, sees both his own reflection, momentarily rendered haggard, and an award in Minako’s name. There must have been a moment where she was the best in the world.

He nearly asks her about it — stops himself. There’s no looking back now. If he ever does, he’ll be lost for sure.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

**Elsewhere, _Elsewhen_**

 

“You’ve got a spark of talent, brat. I’ll give you that. What is it that you want?”

He’d been too young to be wise, back then.

“The world.”

A fool.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

**March, 2017**

 

 _Get coffee with me after_ are words that follow Yuuri home, and even after he’s showered and forced himself into bed, they rob him of sleep. He does not dream to see Mila turning a card over, again and again, to wonder.

_The hanged man._

_The lovers._

It takes a very long time to succumb to dreams, and even those come uneasy. The shrill siren of his phone alarm shatters any pretense of rest, and Yuuri shambles through his morning routine until he can step out onto the porch.

There, asleep on the stoop, is the wolf-dog.

“Hey, watch out,” Phichit helpfully chirps from the from the kitchen, around a mouthful of cereal. “There’s literally a wolf at our door.”

“... Wolves are bigger,” Yuuri murmurs, kneeling down for a closer look. He’s always been a dog person, is a walking encyclopedia of facts and breeds. This looks like some kind of cross between a Malamute and a Tamaskan, dogs which have been purpose-bred to survive cold, Northern winters, and which are as close to their ancient ancestors as is practically possible. At the sound of his voice, the dog’s ears swivel his way, and he soon finds himself face to face with a large pair of dark eyes.

They look … well, if he had to use a word, he’d use _unimpressed._ “Believe me, buddy. I get it.” What he gets in return is something like a snort; Yuuri chuckles and shakes his head. “You want inside, at least?”

The dog gives him a long and pointed look, and then stands up and stretches. Over the sound of Phichit’s protests about how this is very different than the three hamsters he hides from the landlord in his closet, Yuuri opens the front door, and tries to let the would-be wolf in.

“Listen, I’ve got class, so …”

With a huff, the dog turns and steps off of the porch, bounding down the street in the direction of campus.

“There’s no way Karpisek’s gonna allow you in his class,” Yuuri mumbles, shaking his head, because he thinks this is his life now: following a homeless dog down old streets poised at the apex of spring.

In reality, it’s worse than he thinks: once he hits the quad, the dog grabs a mouthful of his jeans and tugs him in the direction of the student union. On the third attempt to resist, Yuuri finds himself bodily tackled to the grass and growled at. “Fine,” he snaps. “Fine. I’m not going to class. I’m going to help a stray dog. Where do _you_ want to go?”

The dog lets him up, and leads him up the stairs of the student union, standing expectantly in front of the boxes that distribute the university’s newspaper.

On the front cover there’s news about the basketball team’s latest win, of course, but there’s also a profile of that student Minako mentioned. _Seung-gil Lee._

“Is that what this is about?” Yuuri asks, watching as the dog’s ears flatten. “Seung-gil Lee? You know him?”

He gets a depressed, resigned whine in response.

 

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Seung-gil Lee, Yuuri learns, is a computer science student with a 4.0 average, poised to graduate at the top of his class in another year. He’s discovering this while he skips this morning’s music theory class; the little voice that tends to self-sabotage has already told Yuuri that being ten minutes late is as grave a sin as a full absence. The school newspaper is rightfully critical of the campus police, who have struggled to find leads. Seung-gil is described as a bit of a loner by every classmate interviewed for the paper, in the same breath that they admit to being bewildered by his absence. _I’ve been here for two years and I’ve never seen Lee miss a lab._

“No mention of you in here,” Yuuri murmurs as an aside to the dog, who sits nearby at attention. For a moment he considers making a stop at the campus police himself, and says as much, only to be met with an irritable flattening of ears and something like a snarl. With as weird and old as this school is, he doubts they’d bat an eye at his story. “They’re probably more equipped to deal with you than I am,” he adds, shaking his head with a wry laugh.

Yuuri Katsuki. White witch. Trembling, useless, anxious mess. He exhales and reaches, habit really, for the dog; scratches behind the ears the way his poodle back home always loved. He’s not sure who it’s meant to comfort, really, him or the animal.

The dog bristles.

Wild, foreign magic crashes like thunder under his touch.

Yuuri faints.

He will not correctly categorize the electric hum of it until he’s already too far down the path to turn back.

_But even if you had known, would you have?_

_No._

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

 "You okay there, dude?” Tan features and a shaggy haircut come into focus along with a friendly face. “I’ve heard about mid-term exhaustion but passing out in the middle of the lawn’s a bit much, huh?”

Yuuri grunts, rubs his face, sits up. The dog is gone. “… Yeah,” he says, and when he gets to his feet, the smiling stranger helps steady him. “What time is it?”

“Man, it’s like two in the afternoon.” Well. There goes his history of music class, too. “You sure you’re okay?”

“I’m fine.” Is he? Yuuri’s never all that sure. But he’s so used to the lie.

The dog is waiting for him on the porch when he comes back home. Yuuri fixes it with a flat stare and holds the door open. “Inside,” he commands, and this time, the dog obeys.

Phichit will protest later, and there is still the mystery of the dog’s hostile magic to tackle, but Yuuri already feels stretched thin, and his mind keeps skipping back to the night before. _I don’t drink coffee late at night,_ he tells his memory of Victor. _It makes me too anxious, and then I can’t sleep. Besides …_

The ‘besides’ — the idea that whatever momentary flicker of interest Victor expressed would pass and pass swiftly, hurts to give voice to, so Yuuri simply lets the dog into his room and climbs into his bed. Then he remembers Mila’s bright face, and impish smile. _The lovers. The hanged man. The nine of swords._ “Nap first,” he grunts. “Figure you out later.”

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

When he sleeps he hears a lone voice, melodic, isolated:

_Have you perhaps been abandoned as well?_

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

  **The Night Before**

 

 

When the King smiles, it’s always with too many teeth. “Working on some new material, Vitya?”

Victor is center-stage in the middle of court. _This is what you wanted,_ he reminds his exhausted body. Though in this place everything is a concept, even the song he’s begun to compose, and especially his exhaustion. If time has a meaning here, he’s yet to divine it. The music, though: like everything else he does, it’s a song about the idea of a thing, and not the thing itself. Even he’s not satisfied with the result.

“Something like that.”

The King sniffs the air. “It’s barely adequate,” he grunts.

Victor squashes his own resentment. It is as dangerous as the disdainful look he’s on the receiving end of. He constructs his smile again and prepares, again, to entertain. “A passing fancy,” he lies.

_Something else to suit your mood, perhaps._

He’s good at that, after all; that’s the whole point.

He can be anything anyone else wants.

Anything but himself.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

**March, 2017**

 

When Yuuri wakes up again, it’s because Phichit Chulanont is knocking, rather insistently, on his door. “Get your lazy ass out of bed, Katsuki,” he shouts, while the dog bristles and growls. “I’m not bringing you takeout with the wolf still in there.” It says a lot about Yuuri’s friendship with Phichit that Phichit knows he’s eaten takeout holed up in his bedroom before, and doesn’t judge him for it.

 _Not a wolf,_ Yuuri thinks, and as he moves to sit up the dog’s giant shadow leaps onto the bed and deposits something into his lap.

It’s the matryoshka doll, still closed, solemn and dark-eyed. Yuuri takes it, gently, shakes the phantom melody of his fitful dreams away. “I get it,” he tells the dog, which is almost certainly a lie. Nevertheless, he still procrastinates. “First, takeout.”

He tells Phichit the entire weird story, top-to-bottom. Phichit is his usual, helpful self: _I know a guy who might know a guy,_ he says, and the dog looks between them both and just grunts.

In the safety of his room, Yuuri goes through the motions, thumbing through sticks of incense until he settles on amber. He sorts through trinkets and boxes on his bookshelf as the dog watches: essential oils and dried herbs; settles, for now, by chalking a fresh circle into the corner, lighting his candles, and reaching for an obsidian stone no bigger than a coin, which he turns over in his hands as he reaches for his magic.

The thing inside of him that’s made of light roars to life like lightning: jagged and rough and wayward, and it takes longer than Yuuri wants to tame his own senses, to coax himself into compliance. This is the battle he’s been delaying all day, the thing he’s been putting off ever since he touched the dog and felt the preternatural power living underneath fur and muscle. Sometimes Yuuri’s magic rears up with a strength he nearly wishes it didn’t have; he likes to delude himself, sometimes, with the idea that he was made for a quieter, neater little life.

Other times he’s perfectly aware of who and what he is.

Now is not one of those moments; he’s still shaken, has been off-balance, if he’s honest, since carnival. Yuuri sits crosslegged; presses the stone between his palms and carries it up, passing each chakra and then extending overhead, not unlike the yoga classes he used to take in the summers to help with his anxiety, only to abandon them every start of term, coping with a schedule of performances and classes filled to the brim.

_Breathe._

He brings his palms back to his mouth, gently blows on the obsidian. Repeats the exercise twice more. Closes his eyes and thinks back through the years. His mother comes to mind, and with her, a simple, homey kind of incantation. _“As of the earth, so let it be,”_ Yuuri whispers, _“that this mystery be shown to me.”_

He unfolds his hands and for a moment, something like the truth reveals itself in the face of the stone. It’s there for a second and no more.

A reflection. The dog’s face bleeds away instantly; behind it are the furrowed, strong eyebrows and distinctively dispassionate gaze Yuuri remembers from the newspaper.

“Oh,” Yuuri breathes, and looks at the dog. “ _You’re_ Lee Seung-gil.”

 


	3. april | sara

**March, 2017**

 

Nearly a week later, and Yuuri’s made remarkably little progress. He’s exhausted nearly every transformation spell he can think of, even after placing calls to his mother for advice, and the dog — _Seung-gil_ — still doesn’t seem to want to approach the authorities. In the meanwhile, Yuuri’s picked up two more absences and a long, long lecture from Professor Morooka about his lack of progress this week on his jury pieces. “Come on,” he tells Seung-gil. “People are still looking for you! Your family’s probably really worried.”

He gets the same grunt-growl he’s gotten every single time he’s tried this or any other argument. “Fine,” Yuuri mutters. Nobody warned him that both hexes _and_ their targets would resist him in every possible way. “Have it your way. Stay like that.”

Except he can’t really sit here and be mean to anything that looks like a dog. After a beat of silence, Yuuri sighs, reaches over, and scratches behind Seung-gil’s ears. As far as he can tell, human Seung-gil hates that, but human Seung-gil is also currently trapped in the body of a dog, and the dog?

The dog loves it.

The dog also barks when the doorbell rings, not two minutes later, although he looks chagrined to have done so. “Yuuri,” Phichit calls out. “We’ve got company.”

 _Company_ turns out to be a lanky guy Phichit’s letting look through their fridge, tall and athletic looking with sandy brown hair and a neatly trimmed beard. “Emil, Yuuri. Yuuri, Emil.”

Seung-gil growls.

Emil turns and looks at them for a long, long moment. And then he puts his drink back into the fridge and shakes his head. “I’m sorry,” he says, and he seems to mean it. Yuuri doesn’t even get to ask why before he pre-empts any sort of conversation at all. “I can’t help you.”

Several things happen at once. Phichit’s huffed a surprised _rude,_ and Yuuri’s mumbling that Emil needs to wait, and Seung-gil?

Seung-gil bodily tackles their guest before he can get to the door.

“Look, man.” Emil puts his hands in the air, disarming, even as he wiggles his way out from under four very large paws. “ _You_ made _him_ mad. Do you know how long it took _me_ to get on his good side?”

Phichit comes around the kitchen counter while Yuuri goes to offer Emil a hand up. When Emil reaches to take it, Yuuri lets his thumb brush the lifeline on Emil’s palm.

Not quite fey, he thinks. But something similar. “That’s cheating,” Emil accuses, standing up and dusting himself off with a brief frown.

Yuuri resists the urge to roll his eyes. “You’re refusing to help a man stuck in the body of a dog, and you want to talk to me about etiquette?”

It earns him a wry, self-deprecating smile. “Yuuri Katsuki,” says Emil, shaking his head. He looks between all three of his possible objectives: Yuuri, the dog, the door. “I’ve given you a hint already ... What will you give me in exchange for two more, I wonder?”

Yuuri looks at him for a long, long time. Considers. Rubs his thumb into his own lifeline and lets his magic do the thinking. _Sylph. Zana. Brownie._ In the end he gambles on a hunch. “My sister keeps bees,” he says. “There’s fresh lavender honey in the pantry. And … whoever it is you’re worried about offending, if it happens, I'll make sure you're not involved."

“You shouldn’t promise things you’re not sure you can do,” Emil chides gently. Even Phichit seems to back him up on this point, and for a moment, Yuuri wavers. Then he remembers the dolls, Mila’s words, the cards, the melody in his sleep.

“I’m never sure of what I can do,” he admits, and he walks around to the one cabinet in their pantry that stays well-stocked with herbs and spices, things Yuuri usually has to restock for spells, even when he’s too busy to bother to cook.  
  
_I don't have that luxury._

He holds out the honey.

Emil considers him for a moment, briefly stroking the short hairs of his beard, and then he smiles. He has a warm, soothing sort of mien, and Yuuri feels himself relax. “Very well.”

He takes it, the sweetest thing Mari makes, stuff worth braving stings for. “One. Where you are headed, Yuuri Katsuki, there is nothing that matters more than etiquette. Two.” He slips the jar into his backpack and jerks his head towards Seung-gil. “ _That_ is not a man.”

This time he leaves without interruption: except not through the front door, so far away. “If you can really manage what you say, maybe I’ll be the one who owes you one.” He flashes a grin. _You already know it’s in my nature._ Emil helps himself into their nearest coat closet, and closes the door. When Phichit opens it again, he’s gone. Yuuri half-expects there to be a kind of buzzing in the air, but there isn’t, just a fresh, safe, summery smell, like fields of wheat.

“Well, Yuuri,” says Phichit. “I have to give it to you. Life as your roommate is never boring.”

There’s that small part of Yuuri that still wishes it was.

 

 

 

* * * 

 

 

 

“Not a man, huh,” Yuuri muses afterwards, watching Seung-gil pace the new circle he’s chalked into their living room. “I think it’s time for us to find a better way to talk, don’t you?”

Phichit’s helping him tonight, more than somewhat unwillingly. “I’m just saying, if he’s just got dog-brain, then what?”

“I don’t think the spell will work if it’s just dog thoughts, Phichit.”

“Yeah, but do you _know?_ For _sure_?” Phichit fixes him with a long, mournful stare, unrolling a fresh spindle of twine. “Fine. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. _Woof._ ”

“Woof,” Yuuri echoes, and holds his hands out. “Three knots each,” he reminds Phichit, who warily loops the twine once around Yuuri’s wrists before going to approach the large, irritable dog. “I’ll do the incantation.”

 

 _  
May we be alike in thought and one in mind,  
_ _Where others sever, let this spell bind._

 

 

He grits his teeth through a kind of growing static, charged and lightning pale. As Phichit ties the third knot, Yuuri finds himself somewhere else for a moment and a moment only:  


 

_(Victor Nikiforov looks into a mirror. “… Yuuri?”)_

 

 

The spell snaps around him like a rubber-band, and the voice Yuuri is left with in his thoughts isn’t his own, and it isn’t Victor’s, either:

_You were bound to Victor Nikiforov?_

_No,_ thinks Yuuri, at this new presence, dark and cool as charcoal. Except now that the words are there he feels it, can’t help but brush over the sliver of loss like a splinter lodged into his thumb. _Not consciously,_ some part of him adds, treacherous, rewarded with an incredulous snort. It isn’t the sort of thing that’s supposed to occur by accident, as Yuuri well knows. Not that it has happened. It hasn’t. _Shut up. Are you Seung-gil Lee or aren’t you?_

_I am._

“Yuuri?” In Phichit’s hands the twine turns grey and then disintegrates into dust. “That was …”

“… I’m fine, Peach.”

Yuuri hears himself say it like he’s said it so many times.

Someday he’ll even believe it.

He looks at the dog. The dog looks at him.

 _Spill,_ thinks Yuuri.

Seung-gil bubbles with resentment in his thoughts, and then he deconstructs himself in the most clinical way possible: retells, almost as an outside observer to himself, decades of painful transformations under the light of the full moon. He sees, time and time again, as a young Seung-gil stoically prepares himself for the transformation, watches him wake up the day after, tired and world-weary. Yuuri can see for himself how much it hurts, every time. _You’re a werewolf._

Yuuri does the math, counting backwards. “You’ve been stuck like this since the last full moon,” he says. “What changed?”

_I asked someone for help._

_Who?_

_A fey prince._

“Wow,” says Yuuri, who can’t help but shake his head and exhale at the scale of what, exactly, it is that he’s evidently up against. “I can’t decide which one of those two words is the bigger mistake.”

He has a dance class to teach, he reminds himself. Getting Seung-gil out of this mess is going to have to wait.

 

 

 

* * * 

 

 

 

Walking through the door of Minako’s studio is, for a moment, like passing through time, like imagining the hungry look on Victor Nikiforov’s face when he asked to go out for a coffee. It’s Yuuri’s imagination acting up again; there’s nothing he has that Victor could possibly actually want.

 _You think about him a lot,_ Seung-gil notes.

_It’s nothing._

_Good. It’s not wise._

_What?_

_Get me out of this, and I’ll tell you._

“Yuuri.”

Speak of the devil, and he always appears.

It’s embarrassing, both thinking and pointedly trying not to think about the way Victor says Yuuri’s name. Outside of his family and Minako-sensei, nobody Yuuri knows pronounces it quite right, and somehow Victor's up for the task. But this is who Victor is: he exists with all the brilliance of a star, and he has the ability to direct that brightness and heat wherever he chooses, and no doubt he could say dozens of other names the same way, like he’s fond, like a caress.

Yuuri feels Seung-gil’s idle derision like he’s got a second pair of eyes. He's judgmental of himself without the passenger-side glare.

“Hi, Victor,” he manages, dumbly. There are children waiting, Yuuri reminds himself. Then he makes himself remind Victor, too. “I have a class to teach. Are you looking for Minako?”

Victor looks at him for a moment, speculative. And perhaps a little sad. “I was looking for you,” he says, and he takes a step closer, stands toe to toe with Yuuri. Yuuri tries to stand his ground, resists a shiver when Victor’s nimble fingers traipse down his forearm and settle into the bed of veins at his wrist. His blue eyes are searching, puzzled even, and then something like the mask that is Victor Nikiforov’s entire mien settles into place. “Are you in the habit of picking up strays?” he asks, and tilts his head towards the door. Through the glass, Yuuri sees Seung-gil Lee the werewolf, trapped in his dog form, sitting curbside. Victor means to sound idle, curious, conversational. There’s a whole host of harmless adjectives he’s aiming for.

 _Yeah,_ thinks Seung-gil. _Still here._

Through the crack in the porcelain that is Victor putting on airs Yuuri senses a sliver of derision and frustration and something not unlike just a hint of anger.

Victor means to sound casual. He misses the mark; the arrow doesn't even strike the target.

He's asking with purpose.

It can't possibly be envy.

Yuuri has never met anyone who attempts to lie to him as often as Victor does. Victor who shows up in Yuuri’s every periphery and asks these questions and pretends to want, and who takes extraordinary steps to give precious little of himself away in the process.

Yuuri bristles. “I slept with you once,” he retorts coolly, which makes Victor’s eyes widen and then narrow. “What do you want, Victor?”

 

 

 

* * * 

 

_You._

 

* * * 

 

 

 

 

“We can’t just have a conversation?”

“ _You_ can’t,” Yuuri accuses.

 _You,_ Victor thinks, because it’s this fire in Yuuri that he admires so much: the way Yuuri straightens his back and looks Victor in the eye and refuses to let himself be charmed.

Victor thinks that ultimately he may be after the very thing Victor can’t give him, not really, at least: himself.

“Get a coffee with me after,” Victor repeats. He lets his fingers drift, wanders over the heat of Yuuri’s palm. Treks across the valley of the lifeline there. There is no hint of _them_ left anymore, and he has no right to be distraught by it: he banished all the echoes of Yuuri’s beautiful, soft magic from his own skin after carnival.

Still, Yuuri stands before him a creature of two minds, bound to something else, and Victor is selfish and self-aware and he hates it. In the way Yuuri’s magic clung to him, he imagines some of his own essence might have lingered. Not anymore. The sliver of magic between the witch and the werewolf Michele’s cursed out on the street is a palpable buzzing on the periphery of Victor’s senses, like the background static of an old television.

He wants it gone. _Hypocrite._

He sees Yuuri shift and change in front of him, intuitively knows that fresh rejection is on its way. Victor exhales, scrambles to construct an alternative. “I’m really good with kids,” he says, which is true; he can make a fool out of himself in ways that never fail to delight. _Jester._ It’s too close to the mark. He’s a toy, a wind-up box. He never fails to entertain. “… I can help, with your class. And then I’ll buy you a coffee. Please?”

It’s dangerous, to keep spending so much time with someone who sees him so clearly. But now that he’s had a taste of it, of what it feels like to know and be known, Victor doesn’t know how to stop.

Yuuri sighs and looks at the dog Victor would really rather _wasn’t_ sharing his mindspace. Victor’s eyes follow his. The dog growls.

“… Do you know him?” Yuuri asks, tilting his head, making a calculation Victor can’t quite follow. Another reminder that a second conversation is happening between the witch and the wolf, and that he's not privvy to its details. 

“Not personally.” Nor does he want to. But _Yuuri_ wants this thing around enough to have tied their minds together. “… What’s it to you?” _What’s he to you?_

“I’m helping him.”

“That’s profoundly unwise.”

“It wouldn’t be the worst decision I’ve ever made, would it?”

It's always the close knife, isn't it? Victor wavers for a moment, blinded by the sheer hurt of it. Perhaps he’s wrong after all. Perhaps this is just a little infatuation, a distraction, something that’ll fade with time if he’ll just stop circling back on it.

Perhaps Yuuri is a scab he should stop picking at.

Yuuri is still watching him. Is always watching him. And now Victor realizes he’s given something else away: tacit acknowledgment that he’s given Yuuri the ability to hurt him, somehow, that even if he prefers not to show it, he aches and he bleeds.

“I wasn’t talking about you,” Yuuri mumbles, and he pushes the door open a little wider, holds it open for Victor. “… Will you tell me what happened to him, afterwards?”

“You could ask him yourself,” Victor murmurs, because he’s petulant, because he’s still smarting and stung. It’s strange what this says: _you’re a witch, and I know you’re a witch, and now you know something about me, too._

_You know I can sense these things._

“I could,” Yuuri agrees quietly, and he’s still looking, still searching Victor’s face. Someday he is going to come to the end of whatever it is that Victor is, and Victor imagines it will be over then. He actually has relatively little to offer. The real Victor isn’t particularly impressive. “But I’m asking you.”

“Fine. Over coffee?”

“I drink tea when it’s late like this.”

Victor gives him his brightest smile. Yuuri stares at it like it’s a trap.

That’s fair enough, Victor supposes. It usually is.

“Tea,” he agrees, and as he says it he realizes he likes that idea better anyway. It’s better still when they’re sitting across from each other in a local coffee shop, already mostly abandoned. Yuuri drinks something minty with a healthy dollop of honey — a soothing combination, the kind of thing meant to stave off anxiety. He has clever, nimble fingers, those beautiful musician hands, and they trouble the cup, darting around the edge of its cardboard sleeve.

Victor’s ordered his tea black, with a dollop of blackcurrant jam he had to buy a pastry to earn the rights to even have. The pastry goes uneaten. If there was a way to make the tea blacker, he’d do it.

Victor’s nights are long, and this one is hardly even beginning.

 

 

 

* * * 

 

 

 

Victor Nikiforov is unreasonably good with children, and an adept teacher, too: he observes Yuuri’s students with sharp, brilliant eyes, corrects them gently and charmingly, gives the most enthusiastic, sparkling praise. For an hour, Yuuri watches as Victor makes each of his students feel a part of the sunshine he seems to omit, as he manages a perfect orbit of time and attention so easily that Yuuri would feel like an amateur if he wasn’t — if it wasn’t —

 _Endearing_ is the word he dances around, which makes Seung-gil snort in disbelief. _Charlatan,_ retorts the werewolf.

Yuuri bristles, though he has no reason to. _Quiet. I’m trying to teach._

Afterwards, Victor holds the door for him not once but twice, flashes a smaller, gentler smile, does inexplicable things with a pastry and one of those tiny jars of jam and his tea.

He’s softer like this.

More human.

“So.” Yuuri reminds himself that he has a purpose, that Seung-gil Lee for all of his bark and his bite is sitting out by the curb, hoping that Yuuri, of all people, can find a way back for him. “Seung-gil.”

“Seung-gil,” says Victor, dragging his eyes back up from where he’s been watching the steam rising from Yuuri’s cup. “What I’ve heard is that he offended a fey prince.”

 _Michele,_ Seung-gil supplies. _I went to him for help, not for … not for this._

“Yes,” Yuuri murmurs. He tilts his head, and glances back out towards the street, and watches as the wolf begins to pace. “… I don’t think he knows what he did that would have earned him this, though.”

“Ah, well. That’s easily deduced. There’s only one thing Mickey loves enough to bother punishing someone for.”

“And that is?”

“His sister.”

_Sara …?_

“Sara,” Yuuri suggests, echoing Seung-gil's suspicions.

Victor confirms it for them both. “Sara.”

 

 

 

* * * 

 

 

 

**February 2017, Carnival**

 

Seung-gil Lee doesn’t like these sorts of things. The sensory overload of any crowd is enough to handle without the lights and glitz of a festival, and he feels preoccupied cataloguing smells, sights, sounds.

In a throng like this one, he always has his hackles raised.

Perhaps that’s why he’s standing against the wall by the door, a muted figure in head to toe black and an understated mask. It’s not the only reason, of course. He could be at home, wrestling with some new puzzle, but instead he’s here because _this_ is one of the few nights where something like a supernatural truce settles over the entire city. He’s already filed away three vampires and a brownie, but they’re not why he’s here.

He’s here to find Michele Crispino, to seek the help of the fey. He has a whole speech rehearsed: _it was a childhood accident, the incident. I’m not part of a pack. The transformations are painful and I’m tired of suffering, and I’m willing to be in your debt._

The pianist of the evening is a witch, and he’s currently making a fool of himself with — well. Seung-gil Lee is not quite sure _what_ Victor Nikiforov is, but he can tell someone has a hold on him somehow. There's a foreign aspect to his aura, something strange and dangerous and binding.

They always do pick the prettiest things.

He’s busy thinking about it when two others walk in, arm in arm, and simply because they're nearby, Seung-gil can't help but overhear what sounds like the tail end of an argument. “Who cares?” He doubts there’s anything in this room that he couldn’t hear or smell, if he wanted to, down to the very notes of the woman’s perfume. It reminds him of someone else, someone he can’t place right away. Together, though, these two make an elegant pair: she’s got thick, black hair, swept up to bare her neck, dressed in a glittering, champagne-colored cocktail dress. He’s in a classic suit, except for the violet-colored velvet of his blazer. It's flawlessly tailored.

That’s when Seung-gil notices it, belatedly: the steady purple of their eyes, behind both of their masks. _Twins. “_ What happens in _that_ court is not our concern.”

“He’s being careless. You know the old man won’t like it.”

“Well, _I_ think it’s romantic.” She purses her lips. “ _I’d_ like to be swept off my feet like that someday by someone brave and dashing and different.”

It’s an oddly specific set of terms.

Like she already has someone in mind.

“I should hope not,” retorts the man in the jacket, incredulous.

 In response, she twists her arm out of his, pouts. Seung-gil feels the hair on the back of his neck standing at attention. He's overfamiliar with the apex between fight or flight; it's a place his instincts have him visiting all-too-often. “Maybe I’ll even find my match tonight, mm?” She turns to the nearest party-goer, a man in all black, leaning against the wall, and that’s when Seung-gil registers the subtle field of electric magic, like wild lightning, beautiful and dangerous both.  _Fey._   _She's fey. They both are._ “What do you say, stranger? Will you dance with me?”

Seung-gil will later admit to himself that his reaction may have been panic. “No,” he says.

 _No_ is also what Michele Crispino thinks, when he’s approached later for his assistance. Not _no thank you,_ not _another time perhaps._

Simple and cold and a little bit cruel. **_No, I think not._**

 

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

**March, 2017**

 

 

“I think you’re wrong about something,” Yuuri tells Victor later, standing outside of a closed coffee shop with his hands in his pockets while Seung-gil paces the curb.

Victor is handsome in his peacoat and scarf. “You would,” he chides, a little playfully, and with a subtle smile that seems to live mostly in the corner of his eyes. “What is it?”

“To punish someone like this,” Yuuri mumbles, kicking at a pebble on the sidewalk before he looks up at Victor. “That could never be love.”

Victor’s brows lift, and under the faint yellow glow emanating from the streetlight at the corner, he looks subtly surprised. He leans closer, and Yuuri is certain he detects a slight trembling when Victor tucks one strand of hair back behind his ear. “No,” he replies quietly, expression uncharacteristically serious. “I suppose it isn’t.”

For a moment that’s both short as a single heartbeat and also as long as a promise, Yuuri’s certain that Victor’s going to ask to walk him home.

Except Victor looks over at Seung-gil, and the magic of that instant evaporates like steam. “Goodnight, Yuuri.”

“Goodnight, Victor.”

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

**March, 2017**

 

 

Yuuri scries for Sara for three days without success. He’s waiting in line for lunch at the student union one day, preoccupied by the effort, when a familiar streak of red lights up his vision.

“… _Mila?_ ”

The fortune-teller turns and offers him her brightest, boldest grin. She’s in jeans with holes in the knees, splattered with paint, and an old, oversized flannel shirt rolled up to the elbows and faring no better for wear.

It’s crooked. It’s dashing. It’s different.

“Yuuri, right?”

They get lunch together; Yuuri picks at the school’s attempt at stir-fry while Mila makes fast work of a burger and fries. “I was hoping you could help me find someone,” he murmurs. “It … It seems like something you might be good at.”

“Who’re you looking for?”

“… Her name is Sara.”

“Oh, honey.” There’s a change in Mila’s smile that gives Yuuri a familiar feeling; it’s both brighter and a little more fragile. And yet it seems to be gathering strength. “I could find _her_ anywhere.”

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

In the end, Yuuri Katsuki meets Sara Crispino at the Botanic Gardens, overlooking bursts of day-lilies nestled among a half-circle of ferns. “I was hoping you could help me help someone else,” he admits while they walk. Sara shines in the mid-afternoon sun; she’s effusive and bubbly and it’s hard to picture a vindictive twin ready to punish anyone who failed to walk the narrow line between finding her too lovely, and finding her not lovely enough.

“Who?”

Yuuri takes a deep breath. Like Seung-gil, he’s rehearsed a narrative. It starts like this:

_I know a werewolf who sought relief from his condition in the magic of the fae …_

“ … Your brother took offense when he turned down a dance with you at Carnival,” Yuuri explains. “He’s been trapped in his … wolf form … ever since the last full moon.”

Sara’s purple eyes are ablaze, though they belie what she says next. “You understand that we have rules about these kinds of things,” she murmurs, carefully measuring her words. “About interfering in the magic of another member of court.”

“I don’t, really,” Yuuri admits quietly. “I can’t pretend to. But I think …”

“Yes?”

“Well, if anything, to me it sounds like perhaps your brother should stop interfering with you.”

Sara reaches over to brush the petals of a deep red marigold, expression thoughtful and soft. “Quite,” she murmurs gently, and for a moment Yuuri thinks she’s going to pluck the flower, only Sara withdraws her hand. “… Bring him here, at the next full moon. Midnight. I’ll release him from the spell. But I need you to do something in return.” She searches Yuuri’s face, flashes a momentary derisive chuckle. “Don’t look so stricken. I’ve no reason to harm you, and I’m not here to trap you or do anything so unkind …”

“Alright,” Yuuri breathes. “What is it?”

“When you get to where it is I think you’re going, I’d like you to win.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You will, I think. Eventually."

Before she leaves she tells him that he is set on a mission, traversing the weaver's web.  _She's very clever, though, that spider. There's no place I'd feel safer._

 

 

 

* * * 

 

 

 

**April, 2017; Minutes to Midnight**

 

 

“I didn’t realize trespassing was something we’d be adding to your long list of accomplishments, Yuuri,” Phichit mutters, snipping through the last bit of chain link fence before pulling it apart like a bit of curtain. The wolf is the first to dart through, and Yuuri follows.

He feels trepidation, sure. Fear and anxiety and everything like them are Yuuri's oldest friends, but they're not his best friend. His best friend is near him now, dressed in black, unquestioningly helping him break the law. Yuuri steadies himself and pretends again to be brave. “You’re the one who keeps telling me I need more spontaneity in my life,” he murmurs back.

“Baby steps, Yuuri. Not one night stands and breaking and entering.”

“I don’t know how to do things by halves,” Yuuri admits. For everyone else there appears to be a whole spectrum between spectacular failure and radiant success. He seems to only know the extremes.

His gift bubbles under his skin, bright and prickly as the stars that shine overhead; white as the pale moonlight Seung-gil races through.

Sara is waiting for them in a ring of mushrooms that Yuuri’s certain weren’t there before, and the wolf hesitates, whines at the edge.

_What are you waiting for? Go on._

_It could be another trap._

_I suppose it could be. But I don’t think that it is._

 

 

 

* * * 

 

 

 

Yuuri breaks the spell of binding in the same place it was cast, with Seung-gil Lee sitting in his living room. Seung-gil helps carry back the implements: a little basket of herbs, the chalk, half-melted candles. Each of these things has a place in Yuuri’s bookshelf, and he carefully files them away.

“Thank you again for your help.” Seung-gil’s voice sounds no different aloud than it did in his thoughts: relatively toneless and measured, as though he’s taken care to put himself at safe distance from anything resembling feeling. “... I’m sorry for the inconvenience.”

“People keep telling me it’s what I’m supposed to do,” Yuuri murmurs with a smile.

“That sounds like a terrible reason to do anything,” Seung-gil responds, but there’s no accusation in the words. He spent too much time in the witch’s head; he’s too acquainted with Yuuri’s tendency to understate himself, to hide from his own motivations. “About … About the thing I promised you.”

“Huh?”

“… Victor Nikiforov," Seung-gil clarifies. "He's bound to someone else."

“I have no claim on Victor.”

Without the connection between their thoughts, there’s no way for Seung-gil to pointedly dispute the lie. He has learned that Yuuri experiences the world with great and startling clarity: everything except for himself. “I’ll see myself out.”

 

 

 

* * * 

 

 

 

Emil Nekola is bearing witness to a spectacular argument in the empty hallows of Seelie court.

“No, Mickey. You had **_no_** right. From now on, _I_ make my own choices, _I_ fight my own battles. I suggest you learn to live with it.”

Sara storms out like a rolling, sweeping thunderstorm, all power and righteous fury.

In spite of this, even Emil can recognize a sister’s care:

After all, she’s left Michele to him.

 

 

 

* * * 

 

 

 

Yuuri stands at the bookshelf for what feels like a very long time after he leaves, measuring the in and out of his own breaths.

Looking back at him on the shelf are two little matryoshka dolls. On a whim, he reaches for the smaller one. Twists.

The doll falls open in his hands.

His response to Seung-gil comes far too late, of course, and it's nothing that he'd ever have dared voice. Nonetheless, it strikes a careful truth, like the chiming of a single, silvered bell, like the purpling sky just before dawn. Nonetheless, Yuuri writes it down before he forgets, leaves a scrap of paper next to the dolls, pinned down by an onyx pebble from his collection of stones:

_Real love isn’t about ownership._


End file.
